WarBirds Lovers Duke It Out

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WarBirds Lovers Duke It Out

A 20-year-old Finnish programmer is challenging Internet game company iEntertainment Network with a free version of WarBirds, the company's flagship product.

Gamer pilots around the world log on to iEN and pay a base price of US$2 an hour to play the World War II air combat game over the Internet. More than 200 people can fly and fight in one of several WarBirds arenas, which are popular among real-life military and civilian aviators.

But Markus Mikkolainen, a software company employee, dropped a bomb when he posted directions to download Freehost on alt.games.warbirds (a Web site, not a Usenet group), the unofficial gathering place for WarBirds players.

Freehost allows people to set up a WarBirds host on their own computers and offer free play to as many as 32 players over the Internet.

Mikkolainen was impatient with what he considered iEN's slowness in programming more advanced features into WarBirds. He released Freehost, he said, because it seemed like a good way to give iEN "a kick in the butt."

IEN quickly sought legal advice. Company chairman William 'Wild Bill' Stealey, himself a WarBirds and real-life pilot, said the company has millions invested in the WarBirds game.

"We will vigorously defend ourselves, for us and the whole [WarBirds] community," he said.

Mikkolainen isn't worried about legal action.

"I haven't got enough money even to cover their legal fees, and I hear international law is very expensive. [Also], from what I hear, my host is legal, or at maximum a border case."

Mikkolainen only made the software available for about 18 hours, and after some discussion with iEN, agreed not to provide users with technical support for the host program and not to tell others how he developed the software.

He says iEN could have prevented the incident by writing better code for the game.

"They should have protected the code from reverse-engineering. It is a small wonder that none of their competitors have reverse-engineered it." Most of the smarts in WarBirds are in the free program that players load on their computers; they're not located at the host computer. The host acts as a switchboard, relaying information about the status of various objects like airplanes, bullets, and bombs from one player's machine to the others.

"At first I was just curious about how things worked," Mikkolainen said. "Then I realized that the host principle must be very simple and that I could make my own."

He insists he did no hacking, only reverse-engineering, studying the stream of data the WarBirds program was sending out and using that information to build Freehost.

To add insult to what some people contend was an injury to iEntertainment Network, Mikkolainen added some features to his host software. Pilots can now select the kind of ammunition they load in their machine guns and cannons, or broadcast their location to members of their own "country" with a simple command.

In the regular flavor of WarBirds, any injury to a pilot means instant death, whereas in Mikkolainen's version, pilots can be wounded and must wrestle their battered ships back to an airstrip before they "bleed to death."

But Mikkolainen's version has its limitations. Freehost sites are not easy to set up, and he included little documentation with the software. Some people posting messages on alt.games.warbirds have even confessed their inability to get their own host sites running.

Freehosts may also prove unpopular because of their smaller scale. As iEN's Stealey said, "32-player WarBirds is not the WarBirds experiences; that's just a little bit of dog-fighting. The WarBirds experience is when we have hundreds of guys up there flying B-17s and P-51s and Zeros and we're all doing it together."

Freehost was also out of date within days of its release: it only runs WarBirds 2.70, and version 2.72 has already been released.

For all his impatience with iEN's development of WarBirds, Mikkolainen still enjoys the game, "because it has the best flight model (WWII) and best opponents. And unless someone does a better sim, I still am going to send them money and continue playing."

Talking about Freehost and similar threats to the iEN revenue stream, Stealey said, "We are continuing to improve our encryption and we're going to change our encryption every week so that we give them a little harder time."

They may have to do more than that. There are rumors that a group in Russia is developing a WarBirds superhost, capable of handling up to 300 players. And, as Stealey himself admits: "They're great hackers in Russia."